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Message: <blockquote data-quote="El Mahdi" data-source="post: 5651620" data-attributes="member: 59506">In my experience, such displays of intense defensiveness and indignity usually mean there's a kernel of truth in the observation. Especially when there is no "bullying" taking place. As far as intimating that you might have an ulterior motive based on a bias towards Pathfinder...Yes, Dannager was off base. Though not completely his fault, it is typical for Dannager and consistent with his obvious bias. Go over Dannager's past posts and you can see for yourself. But as the results and accuracy of your reporting is your responsibility, I feel his response was understandable and not requiring an apology. Whether you consider it fair or not, the bar for accuracy and non-bias is much higher for your medium and profession, than it is for Dannager's posts. The weight of responsibility lies with you, not him (or at least to very different degrees). As to the articles themselves: ICv2 doesn't make any claims or draws any conclusions as to what the data means. They simply post the "publishing" information for the quarter. I don't see anything wrong with their article, information, or integrity. Technically though, your article's title is not accurate. "Paizo Publishing beats Wizards of the Coast in sales and Ennies" should have been "Pathfinder publishing beats D&D publishing in sales and Ennies". You compared Paizo publishing to Wizards of the Coast, and not to D&D. Though we don't have numbers, it's probably a safe bet that since WotC is much more than D&D, Paizo is likely not outselling "Wizards of the Coast". More likely is that WotC brings in revenue orders of magnitude larger than Paizo... Then in the article you say: "Pathfinder is now outselling Dungeons & Dragons". You don't know if that statement is accurate or not either, therefore you shouldn't be making it. As said before, the only thing we know is that book sales of Pathfinder are greater than book sales of D&D. But ICv2 doesn't take into account DDI, of which they, you, and everybody except WotC have no numbers on. DDI is a part of "Dungeons & Dragons", and therefore is part of the above statement you made. And since you don't know what DDI brings in, you don't really know if Pathfinder is really outselling D&D. Also, as a "journalist" you know that words matter. Stating it the way you did: "Pathfinder is now outselling Dungeons & Dragons" - creates the picture that Pathfinder has been out to catch D&D, finally has, and implies that this may be the new status quo. More accurately and without "spin", you should have said: "Pathfinder books are currently outselling Dungeons & Dragons books" or "Pathfinder books outsold Dungeons & Dragons books during the last quarter".  YES and YES. When presenting information from a source that may or may not be accurate - or only tells part of the story - then YES, you absolutely should qualify it in your reporting. And if the source is unimpeachable, then you should show why that is true also. Not being complete, accurate, and showing all sides of an issue, is quite normally going to raise questions of bias. The perception of bias on the part of your readers is not the fault of your readers...it's wholly yours alone. Get angry and defensive about that all you want, rail to the sky about it's unfairness, but it won't change a thing: the accuracy of your reporting and it's reception by your readers is completely your responsibility. But, I don't think this is about whether ICv2 is accurate or not. I think it's more important whether or not you accurately represented the ICv2 report - and I don't believe you did. Now in all fairness, your level of accuracy (or inaccuracy) is no greater or less than what's common in reporting today - for both mainstream journalism and internet journalism. Whether that signifies a lack of journalistic integrity or not is something that's highly subjective. Though personally, I think it's normal for the day...but I also think that's a damn shame. Aiming to emulate the most common denominator isn't necessarily bad, but in my opinion is far from laudatory. Reporting should be about the facts and accuracy, and then within that framework be entertaining - but "Reporting" is not "Creative Writing". Save the spin and creative writing for editiorials and blogs. All in all, I find your articles okay. You lack a bit of attention to detail, and the issues discussed above seem relatively common in your reporting also - but as I said before, that seems par for the course as pertains to todays reporting standards. If you want to be just Okay, that's fine and completely your choice. But if you want to be considered "Good", you may want to consider some of what's been said in this thread.  P.S.: I think Paul Giamatti would be perfect for the Gary Gygax movie also.<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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